Pasi Sahlberg is the brilliant Finnish educator who is trying to roll back the global tide of destructive education policies.

Sahlberg wrote an important book, Finnish Lessons, explaining how the Finnish education system was transformed in the past thirty years and became one of the top-performing nations in the world on PISA tests of reading, mathematics, and science.

Sahlberg warns that there is now an infection sweeping the world which he calls GERM (the Global Education Reform Movement).

GERM is characterized by heavy emphasis on market-style reforms: testing, data, measurement of students and teachers, ranking, choice, competition.

Finland has resisted the GERM virus. Its students do not take standardized tests; they take tests made by their teachers, whose professional judgment and autonomy are deeply respected by all.

Finland has made sure that all its children are well cared for; less than 5 percent live in poverty. Our child poverty rate is close to 25 percent.

Finland became a high performer, he writes, not by seeking excellence but by seeking equity, by pursuing the goal of good schools for all.

All Finnish teachers must be well-educated in their subjects and in pedagogy, acquired at an academic university; all teachers must have a masters degree before they can teach. Interesting to note that, by contrast, a growing number of teachers in the U.S. are getting their credentials and degrees from online “universities.” Many states are lowering their requirements for teachers.

Here are the symptoms of GERM, described by Sahlberg:

The first symptom is more competition within education systems. Many reformers believe that the quality of education improves when schools compete against one another. In order to compete, schools need more autonomy, and with that autonomy comes the demand for accountability. School inspections, standardized testing of students, and evaluating teacher effectiveness are consequences of market-like competition in many school reforms today. Yet when schools compete against one another, they cooperate less.

The second symptom of GERM is increased school choice. It essentially positions parents as consumers empowering them to select schools for their children from several options and thereby promotes market-style competition into the system as schools seek to attract those parents. More than two-thirds of OECD countries have increased school choice opportunities for families with the perceptions that market mechanisms in education would allow equal access to high-quality schooling for all. Increasing numbers of charter schools in the United States, secondary school academies in England, free schools in Sweden and private schools in Australia are examples of expanding school choice policies. Yet according to the OECD, nations pursuing such choice have seen both a decline in academic results and an increase in school segregation.

The third sign of GERM is stronger accountability from schools and related standardized testing of students. Just as in the market place, many believe that holding teachers and schools accountable for students’ learning will lead to improved results. Today standardized test scores are the most common way of deciding whether schools are doing a good job. Teacher effectiveness that is measured using standardized tests is a related symptom of GERM. According to the Center for Public Education, standardized testing has increased teaching to the test, narrowed curricula to prioritize reading and mathematics, and distanced teaching from the art of pedagogy to mechanistic instruction.

We have a very bad case of GERM in the U.S. We are even exporting it to other countries, including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Our educational products and ideas should be quarantined at the border. We need medication to stop the virus within our own borders. Let’s recognize the “reform” movement for what it is: a bold effort to privatize public education and open it up for private investment. This is no “civil rights movement.” This is an attack on a basic democratic institution.

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Competition among schools doesn’t improve education. For-profit schools will do what they need to do to increase their bottom line–profits. Competition doesn’t encourage schools to improve the way they educate students. For example, we’ve see with the increase of ineffective cyber schools, that effective education is not improved by competition.

The easiest and quickest way gain a profit is to “compete” for students so the new education game becomes advertising. The school that can attract the best students (those whose parents are most involved or who have the highest incomes) are going to be the winners in the competition between schools. There’s no attempt to educate everyone. Competition among schools doesn’t weed out the bad schools…it weeds out the most needy students.

While I absolutely agree with the evaluation of GERM, I did want to respond to the implication that all online universities are somehow inferior to traditional campuses. It is true that there are quite a few for-profit universities who “sell” degrees. At the same time, though, I have worked with students from not-for-profit online universities who were not only consistently better prepared (in my opinion) for student teaching, but also had much more rigorous expectations and requirements both during student teaching and leading up to student teaching.

As an example, most ed programs at major ‘traditional’ universities (including the one where I work) require students to do in-class observations totaling a specified number of hours. Despite our best efforts to the contrary, that generally amounts to little more than grading papers or setting up bulletin boards for most students. One particular online university actually requires pre-service students to complete a long list of specific activities (including working with a teacher to plan lessons in a variety of settings and then teach those lessons) rather than simply being present for a set number of hours during those observations. In my experience, these students not only get a better insight into the teaching profession as a whole, but also develop stronger skills because they are constantly receiving guidance and feedback from experienced teachers. As an added benefit, each individual requirement can take weeks to complete which means these students often spend MORE time in the classroom than their counterparts at a ‘traditional’ school.

While this may be the exception rather than the rule, I think that assuming all online education programs are poor is just as unfair as assuming all ‘traditional’ education programs are high quality. There are clearly the good, the bad, and the ugly in all formats. For my part, though I can say that I am actively pushing to model our pre-service program on this online model, not because it’s easier but because (I think) it’s better.

(I’ve left off the names of the institutions mentioned to protect the “innocent”)